Colors
by JustKidd
Summary: Sometimes, people fall out of a relationship. Oneshot. Post break-up fic. Description only. Nothing happens.


Robin opened the door to his apartment and let it slammed itself shut behind him. He dragged his feet across the entrance and tossed his shoes to the side before stepping in. They made a dull thud as they bounced off the shoe rack and landed beside it. Robin looked at the pair of shoes, let out a loud sigh, and ignored them completely .Leaving his briefcase right before the entrance, he flung his jacket across the living room, loosened his tie and dove right onto the couch. The leather was cold, but he was just too tired to get back up and reach for the heater. He sighed again.

He always hated the end of the month. He had to run around for half a day in those black shoes with the hard soles that made his feet numb, and had to slump in front of the computer for the other half it made his eyes dry and his back stiff. He especially hated it in the winter, when the day was short and the night was long. It was pitch black when he went out, it was still pitch black when he came back. And lately, everything in his life seemed to be filled with the color black. His desk was black. He used a black pen to sign the papers. To work, he wore black shoes and black tie and dark gray jacket, which was just a fancy way to say a black one. His couch was because they only had it in black and white when they bought it, and a white couch in a white apartment was just depressing.

Robin sighed. He sat up, straightened his crooked back, turned on the heater, and went for a shower. He stopped in front of the room with the dark brown door, which wasn't black, but still as depressing, on his way to the bathroom. Hesitated, he went ahead and opened it.

He was half-hoping the room would be as it always had.

The big brown door used to be splashed with green, and red and yellow, making it looked like a blooming in the winter when compared to the sterile white wall around it. The room used to have paintings of flower garden blooming with colors of summer and spring, hanging all over its walls, with rainbow-colored drapes that never seemed to be closed whenever he was in it, and a thick green carpet spreaded like grass all over the floor. And everything would change when the season changed.

Cordelia always had a way with colors. Just thinking about it was enough to put a smile on his face, long enough to make him forget the dullness of the day, before he was pulled back to the white room with just the black curtain over the window.

* * *

Cordelia sighed. She hadn't had a school holiday this dull since the junior year of high school, when everyone caught the flu at the same time and left her painting the same view from the same window, alone in her bedroom everyday waiting for the phone to ring. And while she didn't mind that for the whole month, there were so many things a girl could do with her free time. And if that wasn't enough, aside from the few piles of fresh snow, the view barely changed at all. It was white. She sighed again and rested herself on the edge of the opened window. The same window she used to stare at a long time ago.

The town had changed a lot in eight years. The night used to be pitch black. It was so dark when she turned the lights in her room off she couldn't even see her own hand if not for the dull light from the lamp post all the at the side if the main road. She would stay up late, and just looked at it, waiting for something, anything that would finally break the monotony. But in a town so far away from the city, even cars didn't go out that late. She remembered the most excited she got back then was whem an ambulance blazed it's way through, partly from the strip of red in the middle of the night, and partly because of the loud siren that managed to wake both her parents up.

Now the call of civilization had finally caught up with her town. The small road leading to her house was expanded to as big as the main road back then, with street lamps just a few feet from each other she didn't even have to turn on the light to read at night. They had built a community park that never seemed to be free of children right beside her house, and a shopping mall next to it. Now her nights were filled with bright neon colors that actually changed with the seasons. The spring was red and green and yellow, while the winter was blue and white and a lighter shade of blue. They shot fireworks in the summer and flew balloon mascots in the fall.

And yet, even with all the excitement around her, she now found herself longing for the quiet night with the pitch black sky and the dull orange light.

Cordelia sighed and stretched as she backed away from the window. School would be starting again tomorrow, and she needed to finish unpacking all her things tonight. No matter how much she loved cleaning and taking inventory, sorting four years worth of stuff was too much for a girl to do alone. She had spent the good portion of her break these past few weeks going through the she brought back from Robin's place, and was down to the last box. She flipped open the cover and went through the sketchbooks, putting some of them in the book shelf and tossing the others to the pile clothes and books and used art supplies at the corner of her room. Her hand stopped, and she pushed her brows together when she picked the last thing out; a sketchbook she didn't remember, but was oddly familiar for some reason.

Cordelia flipped the book open, froze in place for a second before smiling at the poorly sketched pencil drawing of the lake near Robin's old home.

The lines were jagged, the shadowing was uneven, and the perspective was all over the place.

And she finally remembered.

A memory came swelling in her head, of a time when Robin's uniform was still too big for him, and her hair barely grew past her shoulder. She had begged him for a week to teach her how to play chess, and in return, she'd teach him how to paint. He outright refused to pick up the brush because he just couldn't make it work, so she bought him the sketchbook and a set of pencils which he only took one and returned the rest back to her.

She never saw him with the sketchbook again after she laughed so hard she cramped her belly at the result. And she gave up on the chess after two days because he wouldn't let her move for more than three turns.

But for some odd reason, they started hanging out together, even without their other friends. The president of the chess club, and the primadonna of the drama team, were always together, with nothing in common between them. He would bring her to the lake everyday on his bicycle, and read under the big tree while she worked on her painting.

She flipped over to the next page, and was surprised to find another sketch of the same lake, only from a much wider view. The lines were still jagged. The proportion was still off. The shadings were uneven all over the place without any thoughts or reason. The only thing different was the viewing angle and the little figure at the center that smudged a little bit when she rubbed a finger over it.

The next page was dated about a year after they finished high school. It was a sketch of a large room, a living room, with nothing in it, as white as the day they moved in. She flipped through a few more pages, mostly filled with sketches of the same living room, with one new item added on each new page.

The last drawn page was a close up of a figure, sleeping on a bed with the blanket pulled high above her nose. Her crimson red hair was black as coal and twisted all over the place.

Cordelia smiled, and wiped the tears pooling at the corner of her eyes as she put the book in the box beside her, where everything deemed too important to throw out and too hurtful to see everyday

* * *

Robin slammed himself on the bed and stared at the spinning fan just to get away from the sketch he'd been staring at for some time now. Lately, his nights were spent staring at copies of a sketch from a book Cordelia seemed to have left. It was the drawing of the amusement park the went in summer last year, one she clearly intended to finish in color judging from the small dabs of blue and red and orange and a dozen others he didn't even knew existed. It was the only piece in the whole book still in black and white, and had been driving him crazy these past few days.

_Start with the three primary colors, and mix and match them as you see fit_, Cordelia always said. _Mix blue and yellow to get green, blue and red and you'll get green, red and yellow for orange. Mix them all together and it becomes black, which is actually white in disguise_.

He remembered telling her how absurd that statement was when she tried explaining it to him all those years ago. And now, here he was, sitting alone in his room, squeezing his brain to remember the way Cordelia got her colors. He had been making copies of the same drawing, and painting them from memories and the notes she left. He had gotten pretty decent at sketching, but he never 'got' colors.

They were always too complicated for him. And too many. Too strong, too bold. Too unforgiving. He much preferred the simplicity of a pencil.

But not Cordelia.

Black and white were just too limiting for her. She needed her blue, and her yellow, and her red. Her red. She was fond of the red.

It complimented her hair, she'd said.

Another thing Robin never got, but never failed to raise his palm in defeat when she smiled with face tainted with streaks and splotches of blue and green.

Robin shot right up. He didn't know what he was doing back then, and he still didn't know what he was doing right now, but for some reason, he dabbed his brush into the brightest red he had lying around and painted a single balloon. And just like that, his black and white sketch had finally gained another color.

A shade of fiery red that complimented Cordelia's hair.

* * *

Cordelia opened her eyes, rubbed them a few times, and smashed her hand on the alarm clock on her bedside table. She stretched her back and watched her face and went outside only to sigh at the condition of the living room. She took the shoes on the floor and arranged them neatly into the shelf, picked up the doctor's robe and tossed it into the washing machine, went back into her bedroom to get a blanket and covered her mother on the couch. Then, she went to the kitchen and fixed some breakfast.

It was the first day of school after the long winter break and she would no doubt be busy for the whole day. At the very least it would help keep her mind busy from thinking about the past few days. But then again, it was not something she'd rather forget anyway. They never wanted it to happen, but life was interesting like that.

Maybe she would limit the children to just pencils for today.

* * *

**Come on you two. Stop moping and pick up the phone already.**

**Anyway, this was just a concept I've been meaning to try for some time now. It's basically "Can I write a story with just description?"**

**Let me know what you guys think. **


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